Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Everyone I've ever met thinks they have a great sense of humour. So I thought I'd look into humour and see why, if this is true, so few people display any. Click the link for the original article.

Question:Do narcissists have an exceptional sense of humour?Answer:I am sure that some of them do. In this, they are no different than healthier specimen of the human species. The narcissist, though, rarely engages in self-directed, self-deprecating humour. If he does, he expects to be contradicted, rebuked and rebuffed by his listeners ("Come on, you are actually quite handsome!"), or to be commended or admired for his courage or for his wit and intellectual acerbity ("I envy your ability to laugh at yourself!"). As everything else in a narcissist's life, his sense of humour is deployed in the interminable pursuit of narcissistic supply.

The absence of narcissistic supply (or the impending threat of such an absence) is, indeed, a serious matter. It is the narcissistic equivalent of mental death. If prolonged and unmitigated, such absence can lead to the real thing: physical death, a result of suicide, or of a psychosomatic deterioration of the narcissist's health.

Yet, to obtain Narcissistic Supply, one must be taken seriously and to be taken seriously one must be the first to take oneself seriously. Hence the gravity with which the narcissist contemplates himself. This lack of levity and of perspective and proportion characterise the narcissist and set him apart.

The narcissist firmly believes that he is unique and that he has a mission to fulfil, a destined life. The narcissist's biography is part of Mankind's legacy, spun by a cosmic plot which constantly thickens. Such a life deserves only the most serious consideration.

Moreover, every particle of the narcissist's existence, every action or inaction, every utterance, creation, or composition, indeed every thought, are bathed in this universal significance. The narcissist treads the ideal paths of glory, of achievement, of perfection, or of brilliance. It is all part of a design, a pattern, a plot, which inexorably lead the narcissist on to the fulfilment of his task. The narcissist may subscribe to a religion, to a belief, or to an ideology in his effort to understand the source of this ubiquitous conviction of uniqueness. He may attribute his sense of direction to God, to history, to society, to culture, to a calling, to his profession, to a value system. But he always does so with a straight face and with deadly seriousness.

And because, to the narcissist, the part is a reflection of the whole – he tends to generalise, to resort to stereotypes, to induct (to learn about the whole from the detail), to exaggerate, finally to pathologically lie to himself and to others. This self-importance, this belief in a grand design, in an all embracing and all-pervasive pattern – make him an easy prey to all manner of logical fallacies and con artistry. Despite his avowed and proudly expressed rationality the narcissist is besieged by superstition and prejudice. Above all, he is a captive of the false conviction that his uniqueness destines him to fulfil a mission of cosmic significance.

All these make the narcissist a volatile person. Not merely mercurial – but fluctuating, histrionic, unreliable, and disproportional. That which has cosmic implications calls for cosmic reactions. A person with an inflated sense of self-import, reacts with exaggeration to threats, greatly inflated by his imagination and by his personal mythology.

On the narcissist's cosmic scale, the daily vagaries of life, the mundane, the routine are not important, even damagingly distracting. This is the source of his feeling of exceptional entitlement. Surely, engaged as he is in benefiting humanity through the exercise of his unique faculties – the narcissist deserves special treatment!

1 Comments:

You left something out. A narcissist, first and foremost, doesn't care. There will be no sense of regret because he doesn't value anyone's feelings other than his own. When he leaves others with the wreckage, he never feels remorse. There will be no death-bed feeling of sorrow. He will die feeling as good about his life as he has always. There are no feelings within narcissists. No other belief other than belief in self.